Dates

• Existence: 1853 - 1925

Biography

Carrie Louise Kelly Beatty was born in New York in 1853 to Samuel Robert Kelly I and Mary MacDonald Kelly. She was educated at the Bedford Female Seminary in Rochester, New York. After her father died in 1856, Carrie Kelly's mother remarried. Carrie Kelly and her brother Samuel Robert 'Rob' Kelly II did not get along with their stepfather, so in 1868 when she was fifteen they both moved west to Iowa where their father had purchased land sight unseen before he died. Her experiences during her first year in Iowa were the basis for the book "A Prairie Rose" by Bertha E. Bush. In the fictionalized account, Carrie Kelly's name was changed to Rose Kellogg.

In 1880, Carrie Kelly married Samuel Bates Beatty at the Baptist Church in Clear Lake, Iowa. They raised four children, MacDonald 'Donald,NULL Zelda, Robert, and Clarence. They divorced for a time, but eventually remarried. In 1905, Samuel Beatty bought a casket company in Butte, Montana and the family moved there for a time. However, Carrie Beatty became homesick, so her husband bought back his business in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Samuel Beatty died in 1919, and Carrie Beatty in 1925 from an inoperable tumor.

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